Thread: Aopen Pandora won't boot sometimes

Hi Mark - I received my miniPC last night and have so far spent 7+ hours trying to get it to work - I get the same symptoms as you.

When I put in my Pentium M 740 and SODIMM2, HD it posted and I was able to install windows and use it for a while. When I attemped to reboot - no post. Keeps shutting on and off but no POST.

When I finally got it to boot again, I tried changing various BIOS options to no avail. Suspend works - it comes out of it no problem.

I have since tried a Celeron M processor I pulled from a laptop as well as tried Corsair ValueSelect, K-Byte, and Kingston DDR2 ram chips.

I would love to keep it - hopefully someone can helps us out here.

-Martin

Guy's

Are you both sure the screw on the cpu ziff socket is turned all the way
to the locked position? I had to use a longer screw driver to get that last 1/8 of a turn, compared to the socket in my laptop it was a lot tighter.

Only other thing I can think of is the heatsink, did you guy's use the supplied thermal pads, if so, you did peel the foil off the pad?

Thanks - with re-newed hope I unpackaged everything re-inserted the CPU a couple of times making sure the socket was tight.

It took a couple (5+) attempted boots before it finally posted - it seems the CMOS had a checksum error as well and it only posted when the BIOS reverted to defaults.

My CPU is in all the way, and the screw is not really tight here, there is a click along the last 1/8th of the turn. So it seems that it's in all the way.

As far as the pads... Yeah, I screwed up a little and tried to peel them off, but quickly realized that is not correct so I put them back on. At first I was scared but since Windows installed fine (Windows does not issue HLT instruction during install so the CPU runs full duty cycle) I feel that this is not an overheating issue.

Sometimes I have a feeling that it's the video chip becuase in some cases the hardrive goes crazy during "supposed boot", i.e. presumably booting Windows but the screen is off, not just blank still off.

Mark

Mark - I believe you should remove the silver pads as bob2010 mentioned. When you remove them they expose the thermal compound which should make contact with the CPU and chipset.

Mine is working and booting up each time now , earlier it was still a bit random but now I am moving it between my car and home as I continue to set everything up without any issues.

OK, I completely misread that, and, I admit, I am a little stupid. And I was wondering when I was inserting the CPU: weird choice of thermal compound...

Anyway, thanks all for the help - the little fella seems to work like a charm now.

And my hat is off to Intel engineers for very robust CPU design!

Mark

Ok, I know this has been beat to death, and I have done a lot of research, and have done everything properly however . . .

I turn the machine on
It goes through it's normal deal
"Award BIOS . . ."

"Press E to eject the CD Tray . . ."
"recognized drives . . ."
"realtek gigabet boot message . . ."

then a blinking curser at the top,
and then blank screen.

I've tried booting from the same Windows XP cd I have, and I press the enter key to boot from CD, and then at the top of the screen it very briefly says "Windows is analyzing your system . . ." and then back to the blank screen.

It has been working fine for over a week. I've run it in the car for over an hour, and no issues. Today, it started fine, but half way home it just stopped. So I rebooted, and that was the last I saw of the OS.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Todd

UPDATE:

Okay, I took out the hard drive, and swapped it out for another, and it booted fine.

I thought it might have cooled off, so I put the original hard drive in and it did the same thing . . . nothing.

So it appears to have been the hard drive.

Anyone know what may have caused this?

Now i've got to completely re-install everything. Ugh!